On Tuesday 7 July 2026 at 05:30 UTC, a ACK flood targeted a gaming community customer in the Middle East. The attack peaked at 33.5 Gbps and lasted 164 minutes. Traffic originated from 3354 autonomous systems in 111 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | ACK flood |
| Peak | 33.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 164 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.067 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.025% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.43% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 29 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 113 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.